Tuesday, January 2, 2018

2017--A Year of Nightmares

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
Jesus was to have said to his disciples. This should be the proverb that
describes 2017, a year of lost souls.

What does it say about a country that elects a President who shows no sign of
having a soul, but only wants profits for himself and his cronies?

Most Americans in 2017 have seen rock-bottom American values such as
equality, justice, and tolerance assaulted to bring back a gilded age that
profits a few. Instead of draining the DC swamp, President Trump has filled it
with a record number of lobbyists; either writing the bills Republicans are
pushing through congress, or installing lobbyists in the very government
agencies they are tasked to regulate.

The 2017 nightmare began on the election of Donald Trump that will forever be
tainted by Russia’s well-documented attempts to tilt the election to Trump and
the Republican Party.

George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s
inabilities in a Washington Post Op-ed: “It is urgent for Americans to
think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This
seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the
result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and
married to stratospheric self-confidence.”

Psychologists and psychotherapists have said more; that Trump is
mentally ill, or has an untreatable Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but
either way, he lives in a fantastical world of his own making the almost
completely ignores the reality that most Americans live.

The nightmare grew when we learned Russia may have been behind many of the
dirty tricks, and anti-Hillary chants of “Lock Her Up” made by Trump campaign
advisers such as General Flynn. We now know the FBI began its
counter-intelligence operation of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, when
it learned that the Russians had hacked both Republican and Democratic Party
emails.

But Russia only weaponized the Democrats’ hacked emails via WikiLeaks,
Facebook, and Twitter, not those of the Republicans. Therefore the suspicion has
to be that Russia could blackmail one or more Trump campaign operatives into
spying for them because Russia didn’t publicize the Republicans’ emails—maybe
even President Trump and his family? That is precisely what the FBI’s
counter-intelligence investigation wants to determine.

The greatest nightmare of 2017 may be the record income inequity that was
exemplified in the just-passed tax cuts that are to be paid for with up to $3
trillion in added federal debt plus spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over
the next ten years, which impoverish the poorest among US.
Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100
years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income equality.
They found that the periods of greatest inequality were just before a major
recession, such the as the Great Recession, and the Great Depression itself.

Both were the result of record income inequality. The greatest prosperity was
post-WWII, when the modern American middle class was formed due to rapid
economic growth and unionization of the workforce.

Graph: CPBB

When will the 2017 nightmare end? Maybe in 2018, if a majority of Americans
realize the fantasy world the current administration and congress has created is
not theirs; but Americans see a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness is available to all.

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Harlan Russell Green, Editor/Publisher

Harlan Green is a Mortgage Broker in Santa Barbara, California since the 1980s and economist. As Editor/Publisher of PopularEconomics.com, he has published 3 weekly columns-- Popular Economics Weekly, Financial FAQs, and The Mortgage Corner-since 2000, and is a featured business columnist for Huffington Post. Please refer to the populareconomics.com website for further information.